Chase Pierce

summary

technical skills

Not a wishlist, a working set

Architecture

System design, distributed systems, microservices, event-driven architecture, greenfield platforms, legacy migrations, multi-cloud infrastructure

Leadership

Technical strategy, architecture review (RFCs), incident command, service level objectives (SLOs), engineering KPIs, SDLC design, mentoring

Languages

Go, TypeScript, JavaScript, PHP, Python, Bash

Databases

Postgres, CockroachDB, Timescale, ClickHouse, MySQL/MariaDB, MongoDB, SQLite, Redis

Messaging & APIs

REST, gRPC, GraphQL, AMQP/RabbitMQ, Kafka, webhooks at scale

Platform & Infra

Docker, Kubernetes, ECS, microVMs, Traefik, Nomad, Consul, Vault

Cloud

AWS, Google Cloud, DigitalOcean, Vercel, Cloudflare

Observability

Prometheus, Elastic (ELK), OpenTelemetry, Datadog, Sentry, PagerDuty

IaC & Delivery

Terraform, Pulumi, Packer, GitHub Actions, CircleCI

experience

1. Vice President, Software Engineering at Aptive

   Sep 2025 - Sep 2026

   Sr. Director, Software Engineering (Sep 2025) → VP, Software Engineering (Mar 2026)

   • Led a 43-person engineering department spanning product engineering, platform engineering, DevOps, and QA.
   • Scaled Aspyn's delivery and product offerings to all 76 service centers and 1M active customers while holding a 99.95% uptime SLO; ran incident command across engineering and DevOps.
   • Introduced the engineering Forge: scorecards with quantifiable KPIs across reliability, delivery, impact, leverage, and security, holding teams accountable for reviews, rollbacks, and rework, and surfacing engineering health metrics.
   • Overhauled the SDLC to cut low-value metawork and let teams ship faster on work they enjoyed more.

2. Principal Software Architect at Aptive

   Sep 2023 - Sep 2025

   • Architected and led Aspyn, a greenfield platform spanning seven domains (CRM, Field Service, Pay, Sales, Communications, Licensing, Platform) on Go, PHP, React, Postgres, RabbitMQ, and AWS.
   • Delivered a 14-month greenfield-to-GA migration off legacy vendor systems: 76 service centers and 1M customer accounts cut over with zero rollbacks and zero data-loss incidents.

3. Software Architect at Entrata

   May 2021 - Sep 2023

   Cloud Architect (May 2021) → DevOps Architect (Dec 2021) → Software Architect (Oct 2022)

   • Led containerization and CI/CD modernization, moving teams onto continuous integration and deployment.
   • Partnered with teams to break services out of the monolithic repository and architecture, modernizing a legacy in-house framework, breaking tight couplings, and paying down decades of tech debt while modernizing the UI and UX with React.

   Stack: PHP/Laravel, Postgres, AMQP, React, AWS, on-prem datacenter

4. Principal Software Engineer at TruGolf

   Jan 2020 - Apr 2021

   • Owned the marketing website and player interactions with E6Connect, stabilizing the existing Go backends.
   • Modernized peer-to-peer multiplayer and built an engine-agnostic multiplayer service for E6Golf's online play.

   Stack: Go, Postgres, Vue.js, Docker, Kubernetes, Docker Swarm, Traefik, Terraform, GCP, AWS, DigitalOcean

5. Senior Backend Engineer at Outdoorsy

   Feb 2019 - Oct 2019

   • Built a Docker Swarm platform that moved services off Heroku to stateless, Docker-first architecture; owned CI/CD, repo automation, and security tooling, and trained the team through it.

   Stack: Docker (Swarm), Kubernetes, Nomad, Consul, Vault, Go, gRPC, Postgres, Heroku, DigitalOcean, AWS, GCP

6. Senior Infrastructure Engineer at Even

   Jul 2018 - Dec 2018

   • Defined the engineering infrastructure alongside the CTO as the sole DevOps, security, operations, and IT engineer, building a stable, testable, continuously delivered platform as the team grew.

   Stack: Go, gRPC, Postgres, Docker, Kubernetes, Terraform, AWS, GCP, CircleCI, Codefresh

7. Senior Software Engineer at Imgur

   Oct 2016 - May 2018

   • Designed a scalable microservice architecture to replace the legacy monolith, led the company's migration to Go, and shipped Messaging, Favorite Folders, and Video Upload.

   Stack: Go, PHP 7, MySQL, Node.js, AWS, Docker, Chef, Kubernetes, Elasticsearch (ELK), Redis, RabbitMQ, Jaeger, Datadog

8. Software Engineer at Riot Games

   May 2014 - Jul 2016

   Stack: Go, PHP, MySQL, AWS, Docker, Packer, MongoDB, Elasticsearch, Redis, RabbitMQ, Hadoop

9. Earlier roles

   • Developer at BluehostNov 2013 - May 2014
   • Web Developer at BetterServersNov 2012 - Jun 2013
   • Head of Information Technology at SoftwareMedia.comApr 2011 - Oct 2012

Full experience available on linkedin.com/in/syntaqx

education

• Self-taught software engineer

  Writing code since age 11; mentored through a development internship at a local news station as a teenager.

• Granite Technical Institute

  2005 - 2006

  Concurrent enrollment (grade 10): 3D Animation & Modeling, Computer Programming, Information Technology